Sabotage

The crash of a passenger jet that killed all nine people aboard, including a top oil executive and a prominent journalist, dominated Russian TV news programs. The coverage included speculation that the crash of the private Yak-40 jet at Moscow's main airport was a terrorist act.

A Microsoft Corp. executive on Thursday disputed claims that the company tried to sabotage a popular Apple Computer Inc. product. In 59 pages of written testimony, Eric Engstrom, Microsoft's general manager of Internet access, said Microsoft never tried to undermine the performance of QuickTime for Windows, Apple's popular multimedia software.

Most of El Salvador was without power because of widespread rebel sabotage and a strike by 3,500 electrical repair and maintenance workers who are demanding a $60-a-month pay increase, officials said. Five technicians trying to repair damaged power stations have been killed by mines planted by leftist rebels, utility officials said. Also, residents of San Salvador said parts of the capital were without water because electric pumps were not working. Gen.

Unknown attackers sabotaged a transmitter belonging to Serbia's biggest opposition television channel Sunday, its director said. He blamed the crime on authorities. In a separate announcement, an independent radio station said it had had problems with its signal since the afternoon. Dragan Kojadinovic, director of the independent television channel Studio B, said the sabotage has prevented people outside Belgrade--the Yugoslav and Serbian capital--from viewing the station's programs.

Service to about 1,000 Century Cable subscribers living near the Hollywood Bowl was interrupted for more than an hour during the Oscar telecast Monday evening, but company officials said the outage was not the result of sabotage. Saboteurs have knocked out the company's service in the past during telecasts of such events as the National Basketball Assn. championship games, the Super Bowl and other Academy Awards shows.

Federal prosecutors Monday dropped one of two sabotage counts in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against a woman who said she destroyed a sophisticated Air Force navigation computer so it could not be used in a first-strike nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. Katya Komisaruk, 28, who left behind flowers, cookies and a poem after the June 2 attack at Vandenberg Air Force Base, will be tried on a single charge of damaging government property. Assistant U.S. Atty. Nora M.

Blaming street gangs for a bizarre new urban danger, Long Beach police on Friday warned that the sabotage of street light poles pose a potentially lethal threat. Incidents in which gang members have apparently short-circuited wires to knock out street lights to commit crimes unobserved have prompted police to issue the warning. Police said it is "vitally important" to avoid touching the poles because people could be electrocuted, Lt. S.J. McAndrew said.

Security forces have captured two groups of Muslim fundamentalists plotting acts of sabotage and seized explosives, a homemade bomb, guns and ammunition, the official TAP news agency said Saturday. The first group planned to use explosives stolen from a quarry in Hammam-Lif, on the southeastern outskirts of Tunis, TAP said. Some of the explosives were hidden in a lake. The second group was arrested in eastern Tunisia, about 15 miles south of President Habib Bourguiba's summer palace in Monastir.

Federal investigators have concluded that Wednesday night's derailment of a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train in St. Paul, Minn., was not the result of sabotage. The FBI on Friday said, "If those findings are borne out, we will soon terminate our involvement in the case." The FBI is still investigating the possibility of sabotage in another Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train derailment--the fatal crash Feb. 1 in the Cajon Pass north of San Bernardino.

A Navy missile technician accused of sabotaging cables on a Trident nuclear submarine was using LSD, cocaine and methamphetamine at the time, prosecutors said. Petty Officer 2nd Class Ernesto G. Cimmino, 23, of Scotia, was arrested Nov. 26 as the Alaska sat at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard near Seattle. Cimmino faces 23 counts for allegedly cutting 106 cables. Prosecutors say he confessed to damaging 20 cables so he wouldn't have to go to sea.